Eva Ibbotson - Island of the Aunts

Loreen hiccuped and tried to speak but what with her gum and her sorrow no one could make out what she was saying and it was Old Ursula who said: “Queenie’s eloped. She’s swum off with that muscleman who came yesterday and tried to catch her.”

“What muscleman?”

“He came in the dinghy with Lambert’s father and Queenie went up to sing to him. We didn’t think she fancied him but she’s gone.”

A low croak came from Oona as she tried to speak. “She… didn’t… fancy him. She…said his biceps were silly.”

But the other mermaids took no notice of Oona, who was trying to make out that Queenie hadn’t gone of her own free will. Twins always stuck together and what had happened with Lord Brasenott made Oona think that all men were evil, which was silly.

“I spoiled her,” wailed Loreen. “She always had the best shells and the prettiest pearls for her hair.”

“Now don’t carry on so,” said Ursula. “It isn’t your fault Queenie turned out so flighty.”

“She didn’t—” began Oona — but Loreen only put another piece of gum in her mouth and went on wailing. “I’ve been a rotten mother, and it’s all my fault,” she said again, and she picked Walter out of the washing-up bowl and slapped his tail though he hadn’t done anything except grizzle and whine in his usual way.

“We must tell the aunts,” said Fabio.

“Oh dear, must we?” cried Loreen.

But Old Ursula said yes, it was best to own up. “Get some wheelbarrows and we’ll go up to the house,” she said.

So the children came back with three barrows and Art, because flopping about overland made the mermaids’ tails sore, and no one took any notice of Oona who went on croaking that her sister had not liked the muscleman.

The aunts were very much upset. Not because Queenie was flighty, which they’d known all along, but because it meant that Mr Sprott now knew that there were mermaids on the Island — and maybe other things too.

“I wonder if he knew before he came to lunch,” said Coral. “Do you think that was why he wanted to buy the Island?”

“Perhaps he’ll come back with photographers?” faltered Myrtle.

Fabio and Minette looked at each other. They had lived in the world outside long enough to know that Mr Sprott might come back with something much more serious than that.

A day passed, and half a night, and then they heard the sound they had been dreading: the noise of a boat coming into the bay. So Sprott was back already!

In an instant the aunts were out of bed. Etta ran for the Captain’s blunderbuss, Coral fetched Art’s catapult, Myrtle grabbed the long-handled brush she used to scrub her back.

Outside, the night was black and moonless but they could make out the boat nosing in beside the jetty. The engine died…the cargo was unloaded…and almost instantly the boat went into reverse and moved away.

The aunts, clutching their weapons, peered into the darkness. Then suddenly Etta broke the silence with a great shout and ran towards the jetty. And there, standing tall among her suitcases, was a woman in a long raincoat holding what seemed to be a frying pan.

“Dorothy! Oh my dear, how wonderful to see you!” She hugged her sister, unable to keep back her tears of happiness and relief.

It was only then, as the other aunts came forward, that Etta could make out two small figures standing behind the luggage.

“Good heavens, Dorothy, what have you got there?” she asked, shining her torch.

“You may well ask,” said Dorothy, and pushed Boo-Boo and the Little One forward into the light.

Having Betty’s children to stay would have been bad at any time. Now with Queenie gone and everyone so jittery, it was a nightmare.

They were awful children. Not awful like Lambert but awful all the same. It wasn’t their fault; they’d been brought up to behave like idiots. Boo-Boo (who was a boy called Alfred) wore a bow tie and kept asking Art for shoe polish.

“It’s got to be tan, not brown,” he said to poor Art, who was trying to prepare mash for the boobrie chicks and take the Captain his meals and cope with the extra people to feed.

The Little One (who was a girl called Griselda) began to cry straight away because Dorothy had forgotten to pack the hankie with a picture of a flower fairy on it which she kept under her pillow, and both the children were terrified of germs. Fortunately they were so wrapped up in their silly fusses about which pyjama case was which that they didn’t even notice the strange animals or the danger they might be in. They just went on dusting the chairs before they sat down in them and looking at themselves in mirrors and complaining because their underclothes hadn’t been ironed, exactly as if they were still in Newcastle upon Tyne. If Fabio hadn’t been so busy with the kraken his temper would certainly have got the better of him but as it was he hardly saw them.

But having Dorothy made up for everything.

Dorothy knew that there was evil in the world. She had-met people like Stanley Sprott and she had seen some dreadful things abroad—“monsters” that were supposed to be mermaids kept pickled in jars, or deformed beasts put in cages for people to gawp at — but she was not afraid. It was Dorothy who filled the Captain’s blunderbuss with carpet tacks and set up tripwires behind the house and showed them how to make a cosh.

But when at the end of the first day Etta took her sister down to see the kraken, the tough, hard-faced woman changed into someone very different.

“Oh Etta,” she breathed, looking down at the little creature as he slept, “that I should live to see this day!”

Queenie sat in Mr Sprott’s bathroom on the Hurricane up to her waist in scented water. The bath was a jacuzzi, with water bubbling up from all sorts of places. The taps were gold and so were the shower fittings and on shelves all round were cut-glass bottles full of wonderful things: coloured crystals and glittering hair sprays and creams for making the body firm and more creams for making it soft once it was firm and more creams still for making it not just soft and firm but also pink.

The creams belonged to Mrs Sprott, but she wasn’t there so Queenie had the bathroom to herself. It was exactly the kind of bathroom she had dreamt of when she heard stories about mermaids marrying princes and going to live in palaces, but as she splashed more water over her tail, the tears kept welling out of her eyes and she was shaken by terrible sobs. She had never in all her life been so unhappy and afraid.

For Oona had been right. Queenie had not swum away to be with the muscleman. Queenie had been most cruelly caught by Mr Sprott’s henchmen and this bathroom was as much her prison as any cell in a cold and dirty dungeon.

She had gone out for a moonlight swim and when she got to the end of the bay she found a net under the water stretched between two rocks. At first she thought the net had been put there by fishermen but as she tried to free herself it was pulled tighter and tighter still, and she was towed away behind the dinghy and hauled aboard the Hurricane like a slab of dead meat.

“Oh, why didn’t I listen?” cried poor Queenie. “My mother told me to stay out of the way of men.”

She would have given anything now to see Loreen chewing her gum or Old Ursula with her toothless smile; she even missed Walter. But the person she longed for most was Oona. She understood now how Oona had felt on board Lord Brasenott’s yacht; no wonder the poor girl had lost her voice. The round window of the bathroom had a curtain but Des and the two horrible men who guarded the boat had pulled it aside and every so often their faces leered in at her.

“Oh, what is to become of me!” cried poor Queenie, and felt so sad that she wanted to die.